Jim Morgan and the King of Thieves (26 page)

“Well that went well, didn’t it?” Jim kicked a pile of snow in aggravation toward the shut door of the inn.

“Boys.” Lacey tried to turn Jim and the Ratts in her direction, but they were too caught up in their own self-pity to hear her.

“Yeah,” George said glumly. “Not only did we not get the amulet, we didn’t get any other loot either, and of course we almost got relieved of our lives by that mob in there.”

“Boys!”

“No one’s ever guessed before!” said Paul, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it! No old man’s got eyes that sharp. I swear he was like a falcon or something with those eyes!”

“Booooys!”

“Yeah, there’s definitely something funny about that salt, that’s for sure,” Peter agreed, still ignoring Lacey. “Did you see the way he was lookin’ at us? Something queer about him for certain. Like he knew what we were after or somethin’.”

“BOYS!” Lacey finally screamed, and Jim and the Ratts at last turned to her, throwing their hands up with a chorus of “What!” on their lips. But that question was answered immediately – by the gold-toothed smile of the crafty old pirate, the Amulet of Portunes still dangling on the chain about his neck.

“Greetins, my little friends,” he growled, and from the shadows of the alley beside the inn, a troupe of the pirate’s friends appeared in the fading light of the winter evening. At that moment the Ratts and Jim did what any brave young men would have done in their position: they unleashed the most girlish screams of panic ever heard in London before or since.

“Run, Lacey! Run!” Jim cried as they tried to make a break for it. But it was no use. Jim’s heart sank into his stomach. The old salt’s friends were too fast for even the fleet-footed Ratt Clan, and in a moment they had the children wrapped up in their sinewy arms, calloused hands clapped over their mouths.

“Hullo, boys and girl,” one with a black beard said, leering at them. “What do you think we should do with ’em, MacGuffy? Boil em? Skin em? Or just plain, old run ’em through?”

Jim’s mind raced though the unpleasant pictures of each of those morbid suggestions, but even more awful than the wild fear coursing through his body, was the ache in his heart, knowing that once more he had missed the mark, ending up yet again in another hopeless situation.

“Well,” MacGuffy mused, another toothy smile spreading over his face. “It’s the captain’s treasure they be seekin’, so I think it’s the captain they should be meetin!’ Take ‘em to the ship.”

The pirates cackled and growled with mad glee at this suggestion, and with hard shoves toward the docks, bustled Jim, the Ratts, and Lacey off into the cold darkness of the night.

TWENTY–FIVE

eneath the massive winter moon, the burly pirates marched the Ratts, Lacey, and Jim, who was doing his very best to stick his chin out and give the scalawags as little as possible to laugh about, through the snow. The small procession, led by MacGuffy, made its way through the alleyways of the docks down to the water, where a creaky sloop bobbed up and down on the black, lapping water.

“Not much of a pirate ship, really,” Jim said as snobbily as ever. “In some countries they call those fishing boats.”

George and Peter laughed; but Paul and Lacey cringed. Jim though, hardly cared if he was earning himself some rather brutal treatment. He was sick and tired of all his bad luck and was about ready to let
someone else have a rotten time for a change. But the pirates, especially old MacGuffy, laughed right along with George and Peter.

“That’s a clever li’l monkey, isn’t he?” MacGuffy said. “Maybe the Cap’n’ll keep you as a pet. But whether alive or stuffed and mounted we’ve yet to see.” He added the last part with such a wicked grin that Jim, no matter how wretched his outlook at the moment, decided it prudent to keep his mouth shut for the next little while.

As they walked up a rather creaky gangplank, Jim heard the squeaky chimes of an organ grinder whistling and hooting in the night air. The pirates and their prisoners stepped aboard and the source of the music suddenly appeared. He was a huge lump of a pirate with a faded bandana cinched about his big head, dirty hair not much rustier than Big Red’s falling out from beneath the bandana in greasy dreadlocks, and his filthy beard hanging in braids from his chin. The somewhat musically inclined pirate sat on a barrel of grog, happily spinning the grinder’s handle, cranking out a tune and cracking a nearly toothless smile all the while.

An entire crew of pirates, taking little notice of the cold air, littered the sloop’s deck in waistcoat jackets, threadbare scarves wrapped loosely about their necks, some of them resting their hands on the pommels of cutlasses or the grips of pistols, others twirling and balancing knives on the tips of their deft fingers. The lot of them gathered around a couple of small stoves, aglow with orange and white coals, joking and laughing, or singing old pirate songs to the organ grinder’s tune. Despite his situation, Jim couldn’t help but feel that they were a happier bunch than most of the people he’d seen in the dark streets of London these last months.

On their way to the main cabin, MacGuffy found a particularly plump pirate, thicker around the middle than anywhere else on his whole body, slumped up against an empty beer barrel, with an even emptier cup loose in his fingers, snoring loudly. A black raven sat on the beer barrel above the portly sailor’s head, eating what seemed to be corn from the top of the old pirate’s top hat.

“Not even a proper parrot,” George whispered to Jim, but the raven looked right at the two boys and winked.

“Cornelius?” Jim whispered, he and Lacey exchanging startled looks. But the clever raven flew off to the topmast without saying a word.

“What did you say?” George asked, but Jim just kept his mouth shut, wondering what the blasted talking bird was doing hanging about here.

MacGuffy, meanwhile, kicked the old pirate’s thigh with the toe of his boot and shouted, “Avast Mister Gilly!”

Gilly snorted and flew suddenly awake. “FIRE THE CANNONS AND HOIST THE JOLLY ROGER!” he roared with a slurred voice, all of the pirates gathered around having a hearty laugh at the old man’s expense.

“Caught you nappin’ again, did I, Mister Gilly?”

“I’m no’ on watch, Mister MacGuffy,” Gilly said slowly and through his nose, as though inflicted with the worst of all colds. “I was jus’ havin’ a nap ’ere and dreamin’ about somefin…somefin a long time ago…” He furrowed his brow and clenched his teeth trying to remember, and Jim thought his head might pop off if he kept it up, but he eventually released all his pent-up efforts with a deep sigh that flapped his old lips. “But it seems to ’ave escaped me, naturally, sir.”

“Well if you ain’t on the watch, then who it be?”

“I,” announced a voice as deep and rumbling as thunder. The boys and Lacey craned their necks to look up at the huge man who now stepped before them. The ship’s deck groaned beneath his weight, for he was as tall as a doorway and at least as broad, his head was shaved bald and his skin as a black as midnight, strange scars swirled beneath his dark eyes, the likes of which Jim had never seen before. The huge man crossed his arms over his broad chest and smiled down at old MacGuffy.

“Ah, Mufwalme.” If old MacGuffy was at all intimidated by the big man, he showed no sign, slapping the watchman on his huge bicep. “Excellent choice to have you on guard while nothin’ o’ value is on board, excellent choice indeed.”

Mufwalme eyed the children suspiciously, and Jim was certain his eyes, which were a fantastic white against the man’s black skin,
lingered on his face for an even longer moment. He growled at old MacGuffy and put his huge hands on his hips. “I grow tired of your jokes, old man. If this were my country—”

“But it ain’t your country, now is it?” MacGuffy said with a smile, his gold tooth gleaming in the moonlight. “Which be a cryin’ shame if ye ask me, for it would be a mite bit warmer if it were!”

“What do you want, old man?”

“Prisoners to see the captain.”

“Prisoners?” Mufwalme raised an eyebrow and sneered. “They look highly dangerous, MacGuffy. Perhaps you should have called for my help to round them up.”

“Don’t let the looks deceive ya, lad.” MacGuffy smiled lazily and nearly laughed. “These be highly resourceful thieves yer beholdin’, and they’ll be meetin’ the captain if ye don’t mind.”

“So be it,” Mufwalme finally agreed, stepping his giant frame aside to reveal a small set of steps leading down to the sloop’s main cabin door.

MacGuffy and his mates rudely corralled Jim, the Ratts, and Lacey down the steps and into the captain’s cabin. It was a small room, lit by a hanging lamp in the corner and furnished with only a table and an old leather chair. The cabin’s lone decoration was a large map hanging on the wall, one that seemed to cover the entire known world. It was a rather fanciful map, Jim imagined, for it was populated with all manner of animated sea creatures and merpeople and odd monuments in places Jim had never heard of, much less seen before.

“Wait here, darlin’s,” MacGuffy said with a leer. “The captain’ll be with ye shortly.” With that, MacGuffy and all of the crew left the black-bearded pirate and another, who must have been Chinese, Jim guessed, with a mustache that sprouted from each side of his upper lip like long vines of black hair, to stand guard.

It was awfully quiet in the cabin, the faint hissing of the lamp and the soft lapping of water against the creaking ship being the only sounds.

“What do you think the captain’ll look like?” Paul asked.

“Probably huge with a beard as long as I am tall, and a necklace made out of human skulls!” Peter quailed.

“I saw a picture of a pirate captain once,” George said, his face as pale as the man on the moon’s. “He had a sword the size of a windmill blade, and one of his hands must have been chopped off, ‘cause he had a hook in place of it! A hook!”

“Maybe the pirate captain is a she!” Lacey mumbled, but the fear in her eyes plainly told Jim she was wishing she had listened to herself instead of these stupid boys…again. Of course the boys just stared at her incredulously, and Peter and Paul said something about that being the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard.

“This is serious!” Jim cried. “Besides, there are no such things as woman pirates!”

“On that point, young sir, you are mistaken,” a low voice said from behind them, and the children nearly jumped out of their jackets in surprise. Jim whirled around to find the speaker, and icy tendrils of fear crawled over his skin. The pirate standing before them wore no eye patch, had neither a hook hand nor peg leg, and no parrot resting upon his shoulder, instead he wore only a charcoal great cloak, pulled up close to his chin, and a black tricorn hat pulled low over his brow, masking his face in shadow. He was the one Jim had seen twice before. He was the shadow pirate.

“Welcome aboard my ship,” the pirate said and with that, removed his hat.

His skin was permanently darkened by the kiss of the sun, his eyes dark as coal and his hair just as black, but streaked with lines of silvery gray. He was neither greatly tall nor overly short, neither was he extremely large nor dreadfully thin; he was a man one could pass in the street and not remember after one block, but, Jim realized as he studied the pirate intently, if you took a good long look at him, his was a face you could never entirely forget, both calm as a breeze and violent as a hurricane in the same glance. Jim knew he wouldn’t forget that face, for, with an even deeper chill, he realized he had seen it before,
along with his father’s and two others, hanging in a picture frame in his father’s study.

“You…you’re the one I saw,” Jim said. “On the streets outside my home, but you were also in the picture, the one in my father’s study!”

“So, that’s where that old painting went to,” the pirate said more to himself than to anyone else. “I thought he would have gotten rid of that long ago.” Then, just at the corner of his mouth, the pirate twitched a small breath of a smile. “Then again, he always held out hope, didn’t he?”

“You knew him?” Jim now felt a rising heat in his chest, burning the cold vines of fear away. “You knew my father?”

“Yes.” The pirate nodded grimly. “I suppose he never mentioned me, though, did he? Never mentioned the name of Dread Steele?”